Wednesday, May 05, 2010

I don't have anything intelligent to say about the election in Great Britain tomorrow (or, depending on when you see this, beginning in a few hours). The truth is that there are elements of the platforms all three parties that I find interesting, appealing, and that I--as a foreigner without a say in the election living 4500 miles away--I could legitimately imagine myself hoping for something from. Labor is, still, despite everything else, a party committed to egalitarianism; people whose intelligence and skill I like and admire are voting Labor, and that tells me something. The Liberal Democrats are the only party in a position to actually make electoral reform happen--and as I happen to like their proposed reforms (proportional representation just makes sense), I can see the point of treating this as "the election to change all elections." And then, well, there are the Conservatives. David Cameron has said and done some interesting things, but the most interesting of them all--associating the party with Phillip Blond's Red Toryism--has been only inconsistently embraced (if it's been embraced at all) by Cameron's Conservatives. And perhaps that's for the best, because I think Blond's ideas themselves need a little bit more work to be made into something that one could truly build a government (or at least a theory of governing) upon. In regards to that work...there, at least, I might have a few things to say.

For over a year now, ever since Blond's original Red Tory manifesto hit the internet and became required reading for a certain sort of conservative thinker (including myself), various communitarians and localists and traditionalists have been giving Blond a serious look. Front Porch Republic was, to some extent, a central figure in bringing Blond to the U.S. a couple of months ago, and it is at FPR that Blond's ideas have received some of their most intense comments and critiques. However, it seemed to me that the strongest consensus theme to come out of the period of intense consideration which followed his visit to America (see Rod Dreher, E.D. Kain, Lee McCracken, Daniel Larison, and more) might be best stated this way: Blond's--and Cameron's--vision of decentralizing the power of the British state, and empowering communities to have authority over (and take responsibility for) it, so as to make the defense and provision of welfare, equality, health and security less an elite bureaucratic task and more a democratic, associative, communitarian one, necessitates the existence of a sphere of authority and action within which those associations, and the money they would require to perform their tasks, could be located. What would be the substance of that sphere? It cannot be "the free market," because the financial realities of neoliberalism and globalization have made corporations the dominant players in that market, and corporate power is, as Blond rightly notes, no more friendly to democratic, associative, and local action than a centralized bureaucracy could be. It cannot be "society," despite Cameron's "Big Society" talk, because, as John Gray astutely observed in his review of Blond's book, a society that can recognize and organize within itself the norms and practices capable of taking on the tasks mentioned would have to be one which was in moral agreement on what constitutes a "norm," and modern liberal states like Britain, and the U.S., do not have that today:

The core of Blond's political thinking is a belief in an extra-human source of authority....Secularists will be horrified, but there are advantages in the return of theology. Much in recent discourse--not least the ideology of market fundamentalism--has consisted of faith masquerading as science. By re-linking political argument more explicitly with religion, Blond has usefully clarified the debate. Once again, though, he seems unaware of the difficulties of his position. Ours may be a post-secular society (I think so myself) but that is very different from reverting to any version of Christian orthodoxy....Today there is no possibility of reaching society-wide agreement on ultimate questions. Happily such agreement is not necessary, nor even desirable. No government can roll back modernity, and none should try.

So what does that leave us with in terms of finding a realm, a context, a sphere for reforming action, facing as we do on the one hand a desire to empower communities, localize wealth, preserve culture and revitalize democracy, but also facing on the other a world where the technology, mobility, diversity and opportunity which modernity provides is not seriously eschewed by much of anyone? It leaves us with, well, the modern liberal procedural state, that's what. (That is assuming that the socialist revolution and/or a peak-oil catastrophe doesn't dramatically change the world around us, but I assume neither of those will happen by tomorrow.) Ross Douthat had it (mostly) right: in our modern, complex, interdependent world, "government and civil society are so intertwined, in so many areas of the commonweal, that disentangling the one from the other requires a surgeon’s patience and finesse....Would-be decentralizers are forced to choose between the excruciatingly difficult task of turning a welfare state built by liberals to conservative ends...and the near-impossible task of straightforwardly cutting programs that their constituents--and, more importantly, their interest groups--have come to depend upon."

I would take exception only to Ross's framing of the problem in strictly liberal-conservative terminology; the whole point of trying to resurrect older labels--like "Red Tory"--is (for me, anyway) to disentagle communitarian, democratic, local, egalitarian, and culturally and socially conservative concerns from their debilitating rhetorical relationship with a fundamentally liberal way of conceiving of social life. Individuals can and do exist in and through communities, and those communities are capable of governance on behalf of collective goods. Still, the problem remains--since we are globalized, and we are liberated, and we are technologically advanced, and since are aren't going to back away from those realities anytime soon, from whence do those tools of governance come? From organized bureaucracies--and that means, from the government. A more communitarian ideology would, I think, better enable the transfer of power from bureaucratic agencies to more associative and democratic ones, and that is the real value of seeing Red Tory ideas taken seriously...but still, in the end, there must be some authority capable of making the transfer. And that is the real stumbling block for American "conservatives," so-called: they look back at Bush's "compassionate conservatism," his efforts at faith-based initiatives (a historical defense of such was much discussed and critiqued at Front Porch Republic), and they see failure, an over-reliance upon the state (whereas I would argue those were some of Bush's few successes). The struggle for Cameron's Conservatives, to whatever limited extent they really do want to take seriously Blond's ideas, is to figure out a way to conceive of the state as having the moral authority to play the distributor and reformer of power.

In a couple of recentposts, Camassia speculated on what has to be necessary for politics to have an "endpoint," to actually be "functioning," in the sense of contributing towards a particular moral goal. She wasn't making a connection with Cameron or Blond by any means, but her thoughts are relevant to present election all the same. If I might, perhaps unfairly, squish her posts together, she concludes:

The way that American politics are structured...assumes that [the] state can never really be an organic community--like an ant colony, or more to the point, a family--so if it appears to be unified, it is because one person or community is oppressing the others. So the best we can do is to minimize the damage of different communities living together, by containing their disputes within a nonviolent political structure. Sometimes, this can bring about agreements that benefit the majority of people. But it does seem to preclude the idea that America, or any nation-state, can find a lasting unity....If you take it as the natural and desirable condition that most people are going to pursue their own interests and those of their in-groups (however they might define them), where do you get the people who are going to selflessly and impartially guarantee that everyone is able to do so?

Cameron's "Big Society" is, despite its flaws, a worthy attempt to rhetorically struggle with the (to many, frustrating) reality that sometimes it is necessary for the state to act teleologically--especially in the case of an attempt to re-order the political and economic infrastructure of a society. I kind of suspect that, ultimately, Cameron, and Blond, are not quite up-front enough about this reality, though; perhaps because of the Conservatives usual corporate and free-market supporters, or perhaps for some other reason, they do not, on my reading of them, seem entirely capable of focusing properly, always shifting the fault for Britain's asocial individualism away towards those causes that seem least amenable to state action. But it is state action that will be necessary, and it will have to be a state capable of acting in the civic realm with a degree of real moral authority.

If anything, I think the Red Tory concept (wonderful as an ideal, less than wonderful as being currently pursued electorally, assuming it is being so pursued at all) has thus far gotten too far away from the radical orthodoxy roots of Blond's education. Of course, it's too much to ask any political party, any election, to create a civic religion from scratch...but I suspect that if any attempt to get beyond the liberal-conservative hegemony, and really explore a communitarian, Red Tory (or whatever) alternative is to be made plausible, it's going to have to develop hand in hand with a broadly Christian sense of responsibility and obligation, a sense that could enable the government to re-assess and re-apportion its own powers. Failing that, you're going to end up hoping that society will somehow be big enough, or the market will somehow be moral (or regulated!) enough, to make the localization and democratization you hope for a reality--and as worthy as such efforts may be, there's no promise they won't backfire, creating even more of exactly the sort of amoral, undemocratic bureaucracies that you wanted to get away from in the first place. So I suppose, were I British citizen, this is what my vote would come down to: would voting for Cameron begin the development of something that may take decades to really come to fruition? If he's not thinking as part of long-term civic transformation (and if that's not what Blond expects of him, assuming he expects anything at all), then I think I'd rather take my egalitarianism and/or electoral reform straight away, and leave my deeper thoughts and questions for the next campaign. Who knows? Maybe, by then, peak oil catastrophes and religious revivals will have this whole argument settled, and we'll be able to go on to other, better things.

1 comment:

Mr Fox, I am very sympathetic to your argument here, at least I think I am, but please flesh this thought out in another post: "...if any attempt to get beyond the liberal-conservative hegemony, and really explore a communitarian... alternative is to be made plausible, it's going to have to develop hand in hand with a broadly Christian sense of responsibility and obligation, a sense that could enable the government to re-assess and re-apportion its own powers." What precisely is the relationship between "a broadly Christian sense of responsibility and obligation" as you see it and popular government's willingness to fundamentally alter its character and mission? Please, please, please unpack this for us!

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."